The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial - Hardcover

Lipsky, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039386670X ISBN 13: 9780393866704

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2023

Synopsis

The New York Times best-selling author explores how “anti-science” became so virulent in American life―through a history of climate denial and its consequences.

Climate change has become an unavoidable fact and ongoing catastrophe. The science was clear decades ago. How did so many Americans come to doubt evidence so widely accepted and compelling?

The Parrot and the Igloo is the thrilling narrative of our grand lost march: the story of the inventors (Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse) who made our world; the scientists who bravely sounded the alarm; and then the hucksters, dreamers, zealots, and crackpots who lied about that science. David Lipsky masterfully shows how climate denial grew out of early efforts to build a network of untruth about products like aspirin and cigarettes, revealing the infrastructure that allowed denier ideas to take hold, the untrue to replace the true. With narrative brio, Lipsky delivers a real-life tragicomedy―one that captures the extraordinary dance of science, money, and the American character.

About this title

About the Author

David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Magazine Writing, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and many others. He contributes to NPR's All Things Considered, and is the recipient of a Lambert Fellowship, a Media Award from GLAAD, and a National Magazine Award. He's the author of the novel The Art Fair; a collection, Three Thousand Dollars; and the bestselling nonfiction book Absolutely American, which was a Time magazine Best Book of the Year.

From the Back Cover

Praise for Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

"Lipsky's transcript of their brilliant conversations reads like a two-man Tom Stoppard play or a four-handed duet scored for typewriter."
-- Lev Grossman, Time

"Exhilarating...All that's left now are the words on the page, with the voices they conjure of two writers talking, talking, talking as they drive through the night."
-- Laura Miller, Salon

"Crushingly poignant...The rapport that Lipsky and Wallace built during the course of the road trip is both endearing and fascinating. At the end, it feels like you've listened to two good friends talk about life, about literature, about all of their mutual loves. While they were both young men in 1996, they seem wise beyond their years, yet still filled with a contagious, youthful enthusiasm...a startlingly sad yet deeply funny postscript to the career of one of the most interesting American writers of all time."
-- Michael Schaub, National Public Radio

"Totally fascinating...Pretty much ideal...One of the effects of Wallace's prose is to make you irrationally want to be his best friend, and Lipsky creates a simulacrum of that experience."
-- Sam Anderson, New York

"For readers unfamiliar with the sometimes intimidating Wallace oeuvre, Lipsky has provided a conversational entry point into the writer's thought process. It's odd to think that a book about Wallace could serve both the newbies and the hard-cores, but here it is...You get the feeling that Wallace himself might have given Lipsky an award for being a conversationalist...We have the pleasure of reading two sharp writers who can spar good-naturedly with one another."
-- Seth Colter Walls, Newsweek

"Lovely."
-- Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"Part biography, part autobiography, and part meditation on what it means to be a man in modern-day America."
-- Rachel Syme, National Public Radio (Best Books of the Year)

Praise for Absolutely American

"Duty, Honor, Casual Sex: Plain American hedonism is powerful at West Point, David Lipsky found, but so are discipline and self-sacrifice...A superb description of modern military culture, and one of the most gripping accounts of university life I have read. This book must have been extremely hard to organize, and yet it reads with a novelistic flow. How teenagers get turned into leaders is not a simple story, but it is wonderfully told in this book."
-- David Brooks, New York Times Book Review (front cover)

"David Lipsky's up close and personal account of life at West Point is a national service. It takes the reader deep inside one of America's most important institutions."
-- Tom Brokaw

"Addictive...a story that could inspire even nonmilitary buffs to follow the cadets' careers like those of their favorite sports heroes."
-- Newsweek

"A fascinating, funny and tremendously well written account of life on the Long Gray Line. Take a good look: this is the face America turns to most of the world, and until now it's one that most of us have never seen."
-- Time (Best Books of the Year)

"Masculinity has traditionally been associated with the military. Absolutely American, which vividly traces West Point cadets through their four years at the Academy, deals with both sexes and tells a lot about the changing definitions and conditions of masculinity and femininity in the new century."
-- Elaine Showalter, Washington Post Book World

"Illuminating...Lipsky has done a distinguished service to a proud school."
-- Entertainment Weekly

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 2023
• ISBN 10: 039386670X
• ISBN 13: 9780393866704
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 448